


Multinational Marauders

by The_Exile



Category: Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators
Genre: Cyberpunk, Cyborgs, Dystopia, Evil Corporations, M/M, Parody, Post-Canon, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:10:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty years after the events of Global Gladiators, the corporation now known as McMegacorp have dominated the world, creating their own city the size of a small country. Mick and Mack are their most elite cyber-mercenaries. The toxic mutants return and the duo are commissioned to remove a pocket of them from the McCity sewers. During the conflict, Mick's loyalty behavioural chip is damaged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Multinational Marauders

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant to be purely fictional and humorous. It is not meant to be a serious work of protest against McDonalds in any way or even a particularly strong opinion about them.
> 
> It may turn into a longer piece of work.

'Mad Mick' LaFuente, Corporate Battle Cyborg, woke up, stretched and yawned. He turned his phone from the sleep aid app that subliminally updated his combat skills and blocked out evil dissident subliminal propaganda to the communications app that allowed him to receive his assignments from his rather mysterious employer, known only as The Clown. Next - his favourite part of the day - he ate his mandatory Happy Burger. The delicious tangy flavour (he had been reliably informed it was what cheese, pickle and ham tasted like) melted in his mouth, bolstering his morale through his loyalty to the McMegacorp and filling him with the strength he needed to face a new day in the McCity's most dangerous profession. A quick shower later and only then did he feel able to change into his black and yellow jumpsuit with the large 'M' for McMegacorp logos on the sleeves, strap on his combat armour and sort through his vast collection of guns. He preferred energy weapons - neat, quiet, efficient, flashy enough to be seen with in public. His partner Angus 'Mack' Mackinaw preferred heavier weapons that were more satisfying to fire and made pretty explosions. The McMegacorp officially frowned upon civilian casualties but unofficially didn't mind, as anyone who hung around the sort of areas where you would find filthy anti-Corporate dissidents was probably also a dissident by osmosis and anyway it was a cheaper way to demolish all the condemned buildings in the slums. 

He was cleaning his favourite laser rifle when the phone rang. It always rang at the same time of day with that particular ringtone, the one he hadn't programmed it to use. He picked it up quickly - nobody wanted to get the Clown mad at you and he was a stickler for timekeeping.

"I'll cut it short. It's the mutants. They're getting in through the sewers again," said the crazed-sounding mechanical voice, "Mack will meet you at the city boundaries as usual. Don't come back until the problem is eradicated." 

"Clean-up it is. I'm on it right now."

He replaced his rifle and picked up a heavier rifle, along with a brace of heavy laser pistols. He wouldn't be able to aim for precision after all - even after twenty years of service, he still hadn't been able to locate the vulnerable spots on a mutant, any variety of them, that's when another strain of the mutation hadn't evolved overnight. The mutants came from outside the city, where lawlessness reigned without the guiding hand of the McMegacorp, and were created by filthy dissidents in secret laboratories. Of course, the Corporation made constant attempts to root them out at their source, along with all the other consequences of the environmental pollution that ran rampant despite the best attempts of the planet's saviors. Clean-up duty was Mick and Mack's main responsibility, although these days it seemed more and more to involve infiltrating pockets of dissident activity to try and discover the cause of the environmental disasters but, despite the number of times Mack set them on fire, they refused to confess and even went so far as to blame the Corporation.

On his sleek black armoured jetbike with twin gatling laser turrets, he made the journey in good time. It was a relatively uneventful, if long and tedious, trip, with only one pack of Mafia hitmen, three out-of-control military androids, two stray cats and a hoverbus full of cyber-nuns to deal with. Even though the McCity was the size of a small country these days, with an independent Government of its own in the form of the Corporation's rightful and just rule, he managed to reach the border before midday. Among a crowd of nervous-looking workers in maintenance overalls being waved out of an enormous manhole cover by people in biohazard suits, he picked out the taller, heavily-muscle, dark-skinned man in the red jumpsuit, who gave him a broad grin and waved a rocket launcher around. A flamethrower trailed over his other shoulder, connected to his heavier armour.

The two cyber-mercenaries sat on the concrete steps leading up to the manhole, ate another burger each and washed them down with a shared flask of McBuzz coffee-flavoured drink. Then they stood up, nodded to each other and strode through the main sewer tunnel entrance. After so long living and working together, risking death and saving each other's lives every single day, all through the shared near-religious passion for the McMegacorp, words were no longer necessary most of the time.

It didn't take them long to find the first mutant. With a hissing, gurgling screech, something leaped out at them from a side tunnel, slashing with long sharp sickle-like claws that dripped with green acidic sludge. Its main body, something that looked like a slime mould that had simply integrated parts of the bodies it half-digested, mostly sharp teeth and bones, stank even worse than a sewer usually did as it tried to envelop them in its disgusting mass. Something like that shouldn't be able to spring that fast any more than it should be able to fit in such tight spaces. Mick and Mack's cybernetically enhanced reflexes, combined with their advanced cyber-armour and the strangely invigorating effects of the Happy Burgers that coursed through their veins, were a few seconds faster, a fact that saved their lives. What sludge splashed on their armour as the claws barely raked the metal was not enough to corrode its surface. 

Letting out a feral bellow, Mack levelled his flamethrower at them and poured gouts of fire in a rippling arc down the side corridor, enveloping the mutant creature in a rapidly growing blaze. It stank even more as greasy black smoke rose from the burning creature that still screamed and thrashed, blindly lashing out at them. Mick's eyes darted around. His augmented vision didn't pick up any more heat signatures or signs of movement but he knew that this wouldn't be the only one. Assignments were never this easy. Lately, the mutations had been taking weird directions and it wasn't beyond credibility that the damn things had evolved a way to evade scanners. 

They tried not to slosh around too much as they continued down the corridor, constantly trying to look at every dark corner at once.

Every drip from the ceiling, the sudden splashes as rats went skittering in fear from the unnatural-smelling humans, even their own breathing and the purely internal sounds of messages being relayed to them from the office through their cranial commlinks, the slightest noise made Mick want to flinch. He knew that one involuntary movement could mean they lose the advantage. In addition, he was becoming painfully aware that he was now far from the city boundaries, somewhere deep underneath the forbidden outside world where the McMegacorp could not protect him. He knew that the sewers were still considered part of the City and that he should not be so cowardly when he himself was part of the mechanism that maintained order but the idea still made him as uncomfortable deep down as it would any other citizen. 

Suddenly, Mack screamed and began firing. The things were almost upon him, though, and he mostly just succeeded in setting the things on fire that had already flung themselves at him in a gurgling, screeching flurry of acidic claws. His armour was entirely fireproof but the sudden visibility loss and sheer chaos of being covered in balls of flaming spiky goo that wanted to claw off his helmet and eat his face made him fall backwards into the sewer channel. He swore, dropped his flamer and activated the laser field around his heavy gauntlets. Then he went into a frenzy, pummeling everything around him with glowing red fists that seared as they crushed. Mick took out his pistols and began firing. While Mack's armour could probably absorb anything his partner accidentally shot him with, he did not try and fire into the completely disordered melee. There were more than enough mutants trying to kill him as well. Only Mack being attacked a few seconds before had warned him in time to avoid their initial attack. They were showing up on the scanners, now, a swarm of little red dots so numerous and close together they looked like one big blot on the screen, reminding Mick of a rapidly spreading bloodstain. They were converging on the two cyber-mercenaries through the smaller side tunnels and underneath the murky water. He still didn't understand how they evaded the scanners before attacking, though. Maybe they were simply too aberrant a life form to be recognised as living. It didn't matter; what mattered was that there were a lot of them, too many to take on in a straight fight, and they were all trying to kill him and Mac. They would need a better plan immediately.

Mick knew his partner's first instinct would be to try and detonate the tunnels and collapse the part of the structure where the mutants were spawning. They didn't really know where that was, though, or if it would even kill them at this point. It was common knowledge around the Office, if not among the general public, that the mutant situation was getting worse, but Mick hadn't realised it was this far out of control already. Confusion was his primary emotion, even as he desperately poured laser beam after laser beam into the gullet of something that kept trying to swallow his arm whole and bite it off through the armour. The McMegacorp knew all. Only they could protect him. One of the Board of Directors had told him so personally during an award ceremony after a particularly successful mission. This was wrong on a fundamental level. It was insane.

Glaring red light clouded his vision. Ringing static filled his ears. At first he thought he was dying but through the hazy swaying, he could just about make out that the ichor that started to burn through his armour could not be his own blood, that the screams of pain were his enemies' and the roars of battle rage were his own. The pain and fog were from something being injected into his bloodstream by his armour's emergency backup AI, the chattering through his commlink was something to do with his conditioning being fed through all his senses. He could see the Clown's cyber-avatar gesturing to him, wreathed in crimson light like a deity of war, directing his shots with an outstretched hand. This was the ultimate mode of his armour. It was probably playing hell with his power usage. 

Mack started bellowing like a wounded cow. He managed to stand up, flinging several mutants off him. There were steaming holes in his armour but he was also covered in ichor. He grabbed his shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and steadied it in both hands. With only a brief warning to his partner, he began firing rockets one after the other. They slammed into the walls and ceiling, spraying foul water, masonry and mutant biological debris everywhere. A rumbling sound alerted Mick to the fact that the place was falling apart. His combat drugs left him enough common sense to run but not away from the enemy. If they were forced to collapse the place around them, they would make sure to hit all the enemy by running towards every mutant they could possibly find and exploding the corridors behind them, even if it meant they trapped themselves in a corner. Dying for the Corporation was a greater honour than it was a loss. There was a McValhalla, after all: Mick sometimes saw it when he was injected with enough of the drugs.

Time slowed down for Mick when he was on combat drugs, turning everything into a slow-motion red haze of twisted exhilaration. The next few minutes felt like hours, surreal hours of running, jumping, firing in slow motion, sometimes being thrown around by explosives, often almost not getting clear in time, eventually getting lost in a labyrinth of disgusting-smelling pipes that all looked the same and kept making ominous rumbling sounds. It was enough that the dream-like euphoria was starting to turn to paranoia if it were not for the Clown's reassuring words. The McMegacorp was still watching over him. Victory was assured. The City would not fall...

Mack's yelling brought him out of his haze. His partner was pointing at a door. It was huge and impossible to shift without someone activating the mechanism. A main entrance and exit to the complex. They would be able to get out alive! Ignoring the swirling red patterns and McMegacorp theme tune playing directly into his brain, Mick ran to assist with the controls. Nobody was there to activate them but they had been told how to operate the panel themselves. However, Mack's ID chip had taken damage during the fight. Mick swiped in his own chip and punched in the various security codes. There was an ugly mechanical 'ernk' noise and a message popped up telling him that his chip had not been recognised. Access denied. He tried it a couple more times, swiping it up and down and hitting the panel with it, but only succeeded in locking himself out. His swearing grew more colourful. Where were the maintenance workers? There would be none on this side, of course, with mutants roaming around, but there should be an open comm to the other side of the door. Why would his neural comm not reactivate? He couldn't get battle mode to shut down. He couldn't get the comm to respond when he thumped the door panel. It must have either broken or gone into security lockdown. 

The blips on the scanner were mostly gone, although Mick was acutely aware that this didn't really mean as much as it should. Mack's yelling alerted him to the fact that a few mutants were still following them. Accidentally letting them out would be a disaster, if it was actually possible to open the door. Mick sprayed laser fire down one corridor while Mack reached for his flamethrower to clear out the other. He would have to use his remaining rockets on the door if there was no other choice. A few hectic minutes later, the radar went quiet again. The ringing in Mick's head was starting to dim slightly. He knew if he allowed the drugs to wear off completely, their effects would soon be replaced with the lead weight of crippling exhaustion coupled with nausea. He had to retreat. A fine time for the damn doors to stop working. 

He stepped back into the corridor to keep watch, trying to maintain his adrenaline levels, as Mack set to work trying to force the door open. Fortunately, he had some more controlled detonation charges that could probably take down the door, as long as he was given time. They needed to warn the Office that the threat could no longer be contained, even by the elite troops. The City would be heavily disrupted by whatever they would have to do to the whole sewer network but at least they all might survive. Mick wished the voice hadn't gone away. Panic was beginning to set in. He hummed the theme tune on his own instead. It wasn't reassuring him the way it usually did. A strange disconnection from reality was washing over him, as though the world around him didn't feel right somehow. Some of his damaged systems were back online, he realised. Someone was yelling at him down his commlink but the signal was breaking up too much for him to hear anything but the urgent tone. He wished his head would clear up enough to allow him to respond. Still, it reassured him a little that the map was back online. 

Until he saw where they were.

He screamed a warning to Mack. The bigger mercenary turned around, flamethrower leveled, then gave his partner an annoyed look.

"What do you mean, we're going outside?" he demanded.

"The door's an outer door! We've gone the opposite way to where we came in!"

He sighed and lowered the weapon, "Thanks for the warning. I really hope I haven't gone and got us trapped out here. We're in big trouble when we get back!"

"Is your map working yet? Everything else is still messed up but at least I got that working!"

"Well, mine's not. Can you synch?"

"Just about. Probably. I'll try," muttered Mick. The wireless connection was offline but their suit came with emergency jacks so that the team could communicate with and even manipulate each other's cyberware. They sat on the railing below the door control panel, then set to work connecting the two suits. It took a few minutes to get a signal, during which Mick's head started throbbing. If it was anyone else, he would feel highly uncomfortable jacking directly into what felt like a part of another person. It was way too intimate for a business relationship, even if it was only an emergency measure. The emergency had cropped up enough times already during the countless missions alongside Mack that he didn't even think about it any more.

"I'm getting something," muttered Mack, "Damn, this place is complicated. Looks like that gate is down... so's that one... damn it..."

Suddenly, he sprang backwards, pulling out the cables and yelping as if bitten. The sudden disconnection made Mick's headache even worse and filled his head with error messages for a few seconds. 

"Are we under attack? What the hell's happening?" he demanded.

Mack's panicked voice came back, "... Damn behavioural chip's fried! You've been running without loyalty mode on! How long have you not been telling me? How long?"

Through the haze of his vision, Mick saw that the gun was pointed at him. He blinked a few times, "I... I didn't know! Couldn't feel a thing... I have no idea what to look for when they shut off. Didn't think they even could!"

"You do know what the policy is, right?"

"Not if it was a complete accident! You wouldn't execute me, right? It's still me! It's Mick! We fucking helped build this city!"

Mack sighed, "Must have been the acid got into the workings. I always told you to stop using such shitty light armour. We can't go back, though. No loyalty chip means your ID chip freezes up too. The automated turrets will shoot us on sight."

"What the hell can we..." Mick stared at him, "You're not suggesting..."

"It won't mean absolutely certain death."

"Hell, it'll probably mean something worse! Don't you know what going outside means? It's... it's OUTSIDE!"

Mack looked up to the vast, foreboding gates, probably eternally sealed. The noises coming from the outside, sounds he assumed were the hum of the air conditioning and the clangs, screeches and groans of construction work, suddenly sounded a lot more eerie.

"We were braver than this, once," he said, "When it was just the two of us. When the entire world's fate was at stake. When we saw the Clown in a vision, like some kind of religious prophet. It was a quest, back then, not just a paycheck. We're gonna have to be like this again if we want to live much longer. Maybe it's my own loyalty chip acting up as well, but I think things might just be that screwed again."

"I think they might have been like this for a long time," said Mick, frowning and staring at the floor, "I'm all out of burgers."

"Fuck the burgers," said Mack, aiming his rocket launcher at the door, "We're still got work to do."


End file.
